Nithya Raman

D / DSA · LA City Council, 4th District · Mayoral Candidate 2026

“I don’t think a kid’s gonna be safer.” The crowd booed. She shrugged.

Nithya Raman (D/DSA) is a Los Angeles City Councilmember running for mayor. At a Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting in early 2026, she told parents concerned about homeless encampments outside their kids’ schools that it doesn’t matter whether the camps are 10 feet or 500 feet from campus — the kids won’t be any safer either way. The room booed. She shrugged, rolled her eyes, and put down the microphone. The New York Post ran the headline: “It’s whatever.”Her voting record explains why the crowd wasn’t surprised.

Early 2026 — parents described overdoses, fires, and daily confrontations. She described the 500-foot buffer as pointless.

The Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting was not a hostile venue by design — it was a routine constituent event for a councilmember running for mayor in a city where homelessness has consumed politics for the better part of a decade. Parents in the room described what they had watched near their children’s schools: overdose incidents, encampment fires, direct confrontations. They wanted the homeless camps gone, or at minimum pushed back to the 500-foot distance that the city’s own anti-camping ordinance was designed to enforce.

Raman’s answer: “I don’t think a kid’s gonna be safer if they are 10 feet or 500 feet away from a school.” The room booed immediately. Footage showed her shrug as the boos continued, then roll her eyes and set down the microphone. The New York Post published the video under the headline: “Nithya Raman on homeless sites near schools: ‘It’s whatever.’”

The reaction was not a misreading. The shrug was on camera. The eye-roll was on camera. She had voted against the 500-foot school buffer herself — and she was now telling the parents who lived with the consequences of that vote that the buffer wouldn’t have helped anyway.

“I don't think a kid's gonna be safer if they are 10 feet or 500 feet away from a school.”

Nithya Raman (D/DSA), Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting, early 2026 — followed by audience booing, her shrug, and her eye-roll

Every time LA tried to enforce a distance between homeless camps and schools, she voted no

Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 41.18 was the city’s primary tool for establishing anti-camping exclusion zones around sensitive locations — schools, daycare centers, parks, freeway underpasses. The city council voted on it and its expansions multiple times beginning in 2021. Raman voted no on the school-distance provision repeatedly, joining a small left-flank minority while the majority of the council supported it.

In April 2026, Councilmember Traci Park introduced a motion to apply LAMC 41.18 to Venice, following documented evidence of a year-long encampment blocking key pedestrian corridors, an encampment fire, and repeated failed outreach attempts. Raman voted no again. The motion passed 11–4, with Raman joining the council’s three other far-left members: Hugo Soto-Martínez, Eunisses Hernandez, and Ysabel Jurado. The encampment in Venice had been the subject of police and fire responses to multiple incidents over twelve months.

Raman’s stated objection to enforcement has been consistent: that anti-camping ordinances create a “district-by-district arms race” that simply moves encampments rather than resolving homelessness. Her alternative — outreach-based strategies and interim housing — has not eliminated, or significantly reduced, the presence of encampments near schools in her own district.

43,699 homeless in the city of Los Angeles — after years of Raman’s preferred approach

The 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) and reviewed by HUD, found 43,699 people experiencing homelessness within the city of Los Angeles and 72,308 countywide. That is a modest decline from 2024 — the second consecutive year-over-year drop, which Mayor Karen Bass’s office cited as evidence of her Inside Safe program’s effectiveness.

Raman, running against Bass, proposes scaling back Inside Safe and replacing it with a different outreach model. She has not proposed returning to the aggressive enforcement she opposed in council votes. The city she wants to run had 43,699 homeless residents in the most recent official count — following years of the outreach-first approach she championed.

In the 4th District, which Raman has represented since 2020, the schools whose parents showed up at the Sherman Oaks meeting are operating within that count. The fires, the overdoses, and the confrontations the parents described are not anomalies in the dataset; they are conditions the data documents.

Dr. Wojak M.D. on X, April 28, 2026, posted a photograph of an LA roadside blanketed in discarded trash, tents, and debris with the caption: “Congratulations California not a single plastic straw.” The photo is representative. The state banned plastic straws in 2018. The encampments predate and outlasted the straw ban.

“Congratulations California not a single plastic straw.”

@DrWojakMD on X, April 28, 2026 — photo: Los Angeles roadside encampment, April 2026

DSA member, 4th District councilmember, mayoral candidate — 17% in polling as of March 2026

Nithya Raman (D) is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and has represented Los Angeles City Council District 4 since 2020, when she defeated incumbent David Ryu in a primary runoff. District 4 covers Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and parts of Hollywood Hills — communities that have seen significant visible encampment activity throughout her tenure.

She formally launched her campaign for Los Angeles mayor in February 2026, challenging incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D). As of March 2026 polling, Raman stood at 17% versus Bass at 25%, with the race competitive at the city’s crowded candidate field. Homelessness is the central issue of the race; Raman’s answer to it is her record.

She has positioned herself to the left of Bass on homelessness enforcement while simultaneously running on accountability and results — a posture that the Sherman Oaks video made difficult to sustain. She was asking voters to trust her to solve the problem she had consistently voted against enforcing against.

The documented sequence, in order

A clinical summary

Nithya Raman voted against the ordinance that would keep homeless encampments 500 feet away from schools. She did it in 2021. She did it again in 2022. She did it again in April 2026, when a Venice encampment with a documented fire history and 12 months of failed outreach came to a vote. Each time, she was in a minority. Each time, the ordinance passed without her vote.

She then walked into a room of parents whose children attend schools in her district and told them that the distance between an encampment and a school makes no difference to child safety. The parents who have watched overdoses, fires, and confrontations near their kids’ campuses disagreed. They booed. She shrugged and walked away from the microphone.

She is now running for mayor of the city that has 43,699 homeless residents by official count — the same city where her preferred approach has been policy for years. Her campaign premise is that she would do homelessness better than Karen Bass. Her record is that she voted no on enforcement every time it came to a vote. Her response to the parents who said it wasn’t working was a shrug.

Los Angeles has a plastic straw ban. It has 43,699 homeless residents. It has a city council candidate for mayor who thinks the 500-foot school buffer is pointless. The camera caught what the shrug looked like.

“We cannot pretend… that we can snap our fingers, pass a law, and end homelessness.”

Nithya Raman (D/DSA), LA City Council floor statement — on why she voted against the 500-foot school encampment buffer